182
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
sing like she is laughing, looks sad when she sings this and so we children in our dungarees and our turtlenecks fall still. “Darling,” Charity admonishes me when I stand at her elbow. “Darling, I know you have more.” Standing by her slim brown hand resting on the guitar, hand close to my cheek, the shadowed opening of the curved instrument with its soft voice, I fall in love with her as four-yearolds do. And I do sing, though she has to bend to hear me.
As I Am You Once Were, 2018 (tea bags, wax, found photographs) by Dawn Surratt
When I go home, it is Charity this, and Charity that. At the first PTA meeting, my parents tell her, “Faith is so infatuated, she wants you to come live with us.” She said, “Do you have a room?” And they said, “Yes.” It was 1949 or so. It was Greenwich Village. We were going on a big adventure, such a big adventure that our mother kept trying to get my sister and me to pay attention to a book about speaking French with stick figures that did not look at all
like people. We were going to live in Haiti for a year: my mother by birth, my mother by affection, my four-year-old sister, and me. My father had moved to an apartment on East Tenth Street. Charity had spent a summer in Haiti. I remember how endless the time she had been gone seemed and when she returned running across the tarmac to embrace her. I was six. I had no idea what a big adventure it would be. Although there was that Pocket Book about learning French, there was no Golden Book about going to live in Haiti. My mother, postdivorce, taking her two little girls on an airplane to live in the West Indies. Two women, taking two little girls. No man. A Jewish mother and her Jewish daughters. An African American woman, a music teacher with a degree from Juilliard. 1949. No Golden Book to tell that story. My mother said, “Our plane will stop in Miami, on the way.” My sister and I knew there would be more. “Miami is in the South,” she said. We waited. She said, “In the South, Negroes are treated differently.” We did know about this word. Some Italian people had egged our stoop and slashed the hood of our convertible car because of Ethiopia. My sister and I knew about these things. “In Miami,” my mother said, “when a Negro is walking down the street and a white person comes walking in the opposite direction, the Negro has to step down into the street.” “Will Charity have to do that?” we asked. “Yes. It’s wrong, but –” “Couldn’t she just –” we wondered. “No.” “And what would we do?” “We would walk in the street with her,” my mother said. Charity had gone on ahead. My mother, sister, and I flew to join her, my sister and I in matching navy blue dresses with full skirts and white trim, going out to the plane across the tarmac, which was night dark. We slept after take off. When I awoke, my sister and mother still slept. We were flying above a snowy layer of clouds. I thought we were flying above the sky, a thought so big that I just stared and stared while the others slept, just me, looking down on the top of the world. Our plane was grounded in Puerto Rico and we were put up in a hotel with high beds. In late afternoon, as sunny rain swept past the hotel window, my mother called the airline. Again. Could we fly